trace

Actually, this is a follow up post from my performance deep dive into tablespace encryption. After having investigated how tablespace encryption works, this blogpost is looking at the other encryption option, column encryption. A conclusion that can be shared upfront is that despite they basically perform the same function, the implementation and performance consequences are quite different.

Introduction

This is just a short blog post about a simple DTrace script (dtrace_kghal_pga_code), that i recently wrote and published due to a PGA memory leak troubleshooting assignment. A client of mine noticed a major PGA memory increase after upgrading to Oracle 12c. The PL/SQL code did not change - just the database release. He already troubleshooted the issue with help of Tanel Poder's blog post "Oracle Memory Troubleshooting, Part 4: Drilling down into PGA memory usage with V$PROCESS_MEMORY_DETAIL" and identified the corresponding heap and allocation reason.

In the previous post on the decision between buffered and direct path reads I showed the decision is depended on the version. Up to and including version 11.2.0.2 the size of a segment needs to be five times small table threshold in order to be considered for direct path reads, and starting from 11.2.0.3 the database starts considering direct path reads starting from small table threshold. The lower limit just discussed is small table threshold or five times small table threshold with lower versions, upper limit is called “very large object threshold” (VLOT) and is five times the size of the buffercache, which is the threshold after which a table scan always is going via direct path.

A lot of blogposts and other internet publications have been written on the full segment scan behaviour of a serial process starting from Oracle version 11gR2. This behaviour is the Oracle engine making a decision between scanning the blocks of a segment into the Oracle buffercache or scanning these blocks into the process’ private process global area (PGA). This decision is even more important on the Exadata platform, because the Oracle engine must have made the decision to read the blocks into the process’ PGA in order to be able to do a smartscan. This means that if you are on Oracle 11gR2 already, and thinking about using the Exadata platform, the wait event ‘direct path read’ gives you an indication on how much potentially could be offloaded on Exadata, if you keep all the settings the same.

Introduction

The idea for this blog post is based on a recent Twitter discussion with Martin Berger, Martin Bach and Mauro Pagano about revealing SQL Plan Directive details for an existing cursor as walking through the standard Oracle data dictionary views can be very time consuming/slow and there are still some details missing about the dynamic sampling task itself, even if you have found what you are looking for.

Introduction

Last week the DOAG 2014 conference took place in Nuremberg and it was a blast with a lot of useful presentations and especially great conversations and meet ups with Oracle friends. I had a nice talk about the Oracle latch implementation with a participant, who told me that his instance crashes every time, if he (manually) sets a shared latch in exclusive mode and tries to release it afterwards. It sounded really interesting as i have done this so many times without ever noticing such an issue. He also told me that this issue is reproducible at least on Oracle 11g R2 and 12c R1. I had no immediate answer or clue about the described issue and needed to research it furthermore.

Introduction

A long time has gone since my last blog post on SCN in March 2014, but i was quite busy with Oracle RAC implementations and troubleshooting performance issues in the last month. It was a quite interesting time for me and i have learned a lot of new stuff about Oracle 12c and so in consequence this is just a tiny blog post about a new diagnostic event called "wait_event[]", which was introduced with Oracle 12c R1 (12.1.0.1). Oracle has re-engineered its kernel diagnostics & tracing infrastructure with Oracle 11g, which allows you to be much more detailed and extensive by tracing and dumping diagnostic / low level (internals) information. Please check the reference section for more detailed information about that "new" kernel diagnostics & tracing infrastructure, if you have never heard of it until yet.

I guess everybody who is working with Oracle databases and has been involved with Oracle Exadata in any way knows about smartscans. It is the smartscan who makes the magic happen of full segment scans with sometimes enormously reduced scan times. The Oracle database does smartscans which something that is referred to as ‘offloading’. This is all general known information.

But how does that work? I assume more people are like me, and are anxious to understand how that exactly works. But the information on smartscans is extremely scarce. Of course there is the Oracle public material, which looks technical, but is little/nothing more than marketing. On My Oracle Support, I can’t find anything on the inner working. Even in the ‘Expert Oracle Exadata’ book (which I still regard as the best source of Exadata related information) there is no material on the mechanics of smartscans.